December 3, 2016

Photo Walk Along Lamar Street

After finishing with my visit around the Omni hotel by the convention center, I decided to walk along the S. Lamar St. hunting for some night photos. When I do a photo walk with my Sony A6000, I typically carry two lenses — a 10-18mm and a 16-70mm. All the photos posted here were shot in manual mode. Auto mode wouldn’t work well for me due to its tendency to overexpose bright light sources.

As soon as I approached the first corner, this red car came to a stop for the red light at the intersection I was crossing. The car was fairly well lit by the street lamp. I like the red and green (from theBank of America Plaza further away) color combination. So I lowered the camera to about the same level as the car and took this shot with the green outline of Bank of America Plaza in the background. There were two people in the car but I didn’t pay much attention to them, and neither them to me. From their point of observation, I was actually aiming my camera toward the street behind their car.

Sony A6000 10-18mm at 10mm, F/4 1/6s iso1600

Just another block down on S. Lamar St, the horizontal purple lines gave a nice interaction with the green vertical lines. With the camera tilting upward, I composed the two buildings as diagonal lines.

Sony A6000 10-18mm lens at 10mm, F/5.6 1/6s iso1600

Further down the street was the Greyhound bus terminal. I liked the overhead neon sign and spent some time figuring out the composition and tried a few shots. In the one I eventually picked below, I intentionally lined up the Greyhound neon sign with the green vertical lines of the Bank of America Plaza. I just like it better compositionally when they are parallel.

Sony A6000 10-18mm lens at 10mm, F/5.6 1/10s iso1600

Crossing to the east side of S. Lamar, I got a good front view of the building. I liked to Greyhound logo above the building entrance and took the shot below. One tricky thing about capture artificial lights at night is managing the white balance. Shooting raw gives me the flexibility to adjust the white balance during post processing. In the photo below, I left the exterior lights as shot and added some warmth to the fluorescent light inside the building.

Sony A6000 16-70mm lens at 32mm, F/4.0 1/15s iso1000

I saw this blue Christmas tree in front of the Bank of America Plaza on Main St from afar and decided to check it out. As I reached there, I noticed the reflection of the tree from the top side of the Bank of America Plaza’sbuilding sign on the sidewalk. I decided to use it as the foreground in the shot below.